Introduction

What does it mean to say that society exists? To ask what it means to say something exists is to ask more than whether it exists; it is to ask too how it exists, a much deeper perhaps more subtle question about what I can know and say about this thing. In my own field of International Relations (IR), some of us have begun asking something similar, something almost heretical: what is this thing we study, this international system of states? How is it defined and different from, say, the state, or society? And, of course, what makes the international system real? We often speak about each of these things in very real terms; we seem to think and act as if they are quite real—particularly as we pay our taxes from the limited money we earn working for a corporation that earns money in a global economy. And they are quite real. But how are they real? While it is unlikely that most social scientists, let alone most people, ever really ponder questions like this, some do. I do. Maybe you do too—or maybe you are starting to think you might need to. Even for those that do not, however, the answer to these questions will nonetheless have important implications for not just how we study the world but also what kinds of claims we can make about what we study. In that sense the answers will necessarily limit the kinds of questions we can ask and know and thus the knowledge we may produce.